Despite of the recently refreshed user interface of Dynamics CRM 2013 that offers a much more fluid user experience than previous versions, there are still areas in the application that are not very user friendly. Many of these revolve around product and price information, regarding how it is presented and what actions are allowed on it. In this blog post I will drill into a common scenario that organizations who use CRM for managing price list data may run into and present a few options on how to make their lives easier.

Price List and Price List Item Views

A pet peeve of mine in Dynamics CRM has always been the UI that the Price List entity offers to the end user. As many of the readers of this blog will surely know, price list items are the way how products, units, price lists and the all important price figures come together in the CRM data model. If you want to leverage the product catalog and any price calculation features in the sales module, you’ll need to work with price list items and create at least one of them per each product you plan to include as line items on your opportunities, quotes, orders and invoices.

Unless you’ve built a custom integration to a back-end system that will automatically provide the latest pricing information for CRM, there’s quite a bit of work involved in maintaining individual price list item records when prices change or new products or lists are introduced as a normal part of the day to day business. When a CRM user opens a price list record, a reasonable assumption to make would be that he or she is interested in reviewing the pricing information given to the included products. Unfortunately the Dynamics CRM UI does not make such an assumption, rather it thinks the user is interested in only viewing a list of products and their units but not the actual price information in the amount field. Here’s what the default associated view of the price list items gives us:

Well, that sure looks like a good candidate for some entity customization work. Yes, it does, but there’s a “but”. When you open the customization UI and navigate to the price list item entity, you discover that the views are actually not customizable. Nor can you add any of your own views for that matter, which means you’re stuck with the default UI. If you think that the price list item entity should allow view customization, then there’s a suggestion on Microsoft Connect that you definitely should go and vote for (if you need help in registering to Connect itself, see this post).

Exporting the Price List Item Data to Excel

With this limitation in mind, what are our options of producing a true price list view with product and price information shown side by side? For any Dynamics CRM power user the first thing to come to mind will surely be to export the data into Excel. Unfortunately the uncustomizability of the Price List Item entity also means it has been blocked from showing up in Advanced Find, which would normally be our tool of choice for preparing a CRM data export.

Luckily there’s still an Export to Excel button visible in the ribbon of the price list form when we are viewing the associated price list items view. Clicking this will present us with an option to either export the data in static format (which would just give us the same columns as the current view) or to create a dynamic Excel sheet in two possible formats. Both of the latter options, pivot table and worksheet, present a follow-up dialog where choosing the required columns from the price list item entity and even any parental entity like product is possible.

When you export the view into a dynamic Excel sheet in an on-premises CRM environment, you can actually go and look at the SQL query that the view is using for pulling the data from CRM to Excel. Just click “Change Data Source – Connection Properties – Definition” and copy the query from the Command Text window into Notepad. With a little tweak that removes the reference to the currently viewed price list record we can use the same dynamic Excel sheet to retrieve price list item data for all the price lists in the system.

In the SQL query you’ve copied to Notepad you’ll find a reference to the price list from under which we exported the related price list items. It will look something like this: where (“productpricelevel0”.pricelevelid = N’CEA84006-AD7B-E311-9405-00155D6214FA’) . Just remove this whole where clause, thus expanding the query to retrieve all records from the price list items table in CRM, regardless of the associated price list. Then with the Excel pivot table tools you can group and filter the data any way you please, effectively creating a price list report that views the latest information from CRM in a layout that best suits our purposes. [Read more…]

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